Practical Dynamic Thermal Management of multi-core microprocessors

Here we present an implementation of thermally-aware DVFS governor in a form of Linux 3.2 module. Our thermal governor operates by reading digital thermal sensors placed in CPU cores and pro-actively adjusting operating frequency of individual cores to maintain temperatures below given threshold. We evaluate our method using state-of-the-art parallel benchmarks from PARSEC suite. Apart from evaluation of our thermally-aware DVFS governor, we present insights into operation of a modern high-performance CPU with 6 cores and 2 hardware threads per core.